Ride out the wilderness : geography and identity in Afro-American literature /

A persuasive, impressive, and valuable study. Dixon continues to display here the critical sensitivity evident in his translation of Genevieve Fabre's Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre (CH, Mar '84). In this study, Dixon sees geographical space both as a rhetorical trope with literary and linguistic significance and as a real entity with cultural, historical, and political significance. The merging of these two forms of analysis constitutes the significance of this book. Dixon at least implicitly builds on the work of both Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Figures in Black (CH, Dec '87) and Houston A. Baker in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (CH, Sep '85). Ride Out the Wilderness treats the work of ten 20th-century novelists, including Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. Dixon also does us the service of exploring the issue of geography in slave songs and narratives. This kind of panoramic scope has a minor limitation, since it tends to emphasize breadth of coverage more than depth of treatment. Dixon's skill as a reader and critic overcomes whatever drawbacks his approach may have. Useful bibliography, index. Recommended for graduate and undergraduate collections.-T.O. Mason Jr., Trinity College, Conn.